Situated in an yet uninhabited loft on the top floor of ArtHouse, a new residential building designed by Russian architect Sergey Skuratov, the pop-up club Door 19 is in one a restaurant, modern art gallery and a pre-party bar. Open from 25th September to 31st October 2014, the club, in it's concept and setup, merged together high-class and counter culture. The interior design for Door 19 is the work of of PH.D architects, also Russian based. They left the brick, concrete and pluming exposed and used scaffolding construction to form the bar and gallery above it, creating an atmosphere of a work in progress and accentuating in that way the temporary character of the place and the very concept of pop-up. The rough, metal, industrial, functional was combined with expensive and elaborate details, with wood, soft, color. The best street artists from Moscow and beyond have been invited to leave their mark on the space in the form of paintings, murals and sculptures. The experience was rounded off with best quality of food and drinks prepared by Michelin-starred chefs and top mixologists and bartenders, uniforms were specially designed for the occasion by Vardoui Nazarian and Main in Main took care of the sound.
Usually these kind of temporary venues appear in unused and often most unexpected places - old factories, abandoned tunnels, private homes, and are guided by a child like DIY spirit that asks "Wouldn't it be great if ...?", and is not afraid to answer that question and just go for it. By utilizing unused facilities, these then become places of experiment where urbanism, architecture, team work, events, products can be tested. In it's core anarchic, the idea of interacting with space in way is liberating and exciting, and the factor of temporal calls for immediate action because what is here now, will be gone tomorrow and so waiting or postponing is not an option.
According to professor Ali Madanipour, there are two key regards of pop-ups: //One is that they can be a positive way of making more intensive use of urban space// and, on the other hand, //they can be an aid to consumerism in which brands create a stage setting, adding color and texture to the general mall atmosphere that is the backdrop to many of our urban spaces. Pop-up businesses support shopping – they bring a festival atmosphere to shopping.//
Door 19 was being used as a sails catalyst, introducing the visitors not only to the apartments in ArtHouse but also to the potential of ArtKvartal - a government supported project of urban regeneration of a 500ha area in Moscow. //The project is still at the design stage and is expected to take between 10 and 15 years to realize, with a model of gentrification that will fan outwards from ArtHouse, taking into its fold other upmarket art clusters such as ArtPlay and Winzavod. Once it is completed, anyone working in the creative industries, from fashion or film, will have the opportunity to rent a place to live or work in.//
In general, //Pop-up environments bring the realm of the expected into spaces where it doesn’t belong, and better, where its viewers think they don’t belong. It creates an opening not only for artwork to rediscover itself through engagement with an unusual site, and for the viewer who, through their experience of the site itself, finds vacation from normal life and thought patterns.//
[trendland, the guardian, psfk]
